can’t stop watching “Cake Boss” send help
magic/wonderment.
SKULLS
"You want to be a superhero, you can be a superhero. You want to be a gay space pirate, sure. Someone is going to call us faggots no matter what we wear. I don't give a dook, I'm a fucking superhero."
Following
28 Jan 12
Marginalia
Billy Collins
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”
26 Jan 12
1, 2, 3, 4 - Who's Punk? What's the score? JAWBREAKER REUNITES...
life rules sometimes
!!!!!!!
(Source: wigglygiggle)
25 Jan 12
"The joy of bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of the C2H5OH on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime —aesthetic considerations to which the effect of the alcohol is, if not dispensable, at least secondary."
Walker Percy in “Bourbon, Neat,” quoted by Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Since I first read this essay, when I was perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, I have remembered that invaluable phrase precisely and used it on occasion: “hot bosky bite.”
For some time, I supposed —stupidly— that Percy had simply invented the word “bosky” in an effort to capture the way bourbon tastes and feels: two syllables, because it is a matter-of-fact sort of flavor, concise even when complex. But of course “bosky” is a real word, with a definition: “Having abundant bushes, shrubs, or trees.”
Good God! If you’ve ever been in a hot Southern state in the summer, out away from the roads and houses, in fields or little glades surrounded by plain, unprepossessing woods, and if you’ve tasted bourbon, you must recognize that this is inspired, precise lyricism; it is the result of brilliant observation and masterful, unaffected diction. The flatness of bland blue skies which cling close to buzzing, sun-bleached, lush yet crackling lands, the simultaneity of heat and verdancy: this is the best metaphor I know for the flavor of bourbon, which, I regret, is irreplaceable if one gives up drinking.
Note also the two forms of prose: the specialized vocabulary of the scientist as a foil to the poetics of the the real point, the evocation of place and season and atmosphere. The sort of lexical pyrotechnics for which many esteem David Foster Wallace predates him, of course, although in “Oblivion” I believe he brought it to an apotheosis of sorts (an anti-apotheosis: the dull triumph of inhumanly technical language). But it is worth noting because Wallace’s real gifts, like Percy’s, have nothing to do with the niftiness of his interdisciplinary sentences; that is a matter of style, a style which either supports higher artistic aims or is lazy mannerism, as most writing in fact is.
(via mills)
(via mills)
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
The Mountain Goats - Jam Eater Blues
24 Jan 12
23 Jan 12
22 Jan 12
